Crime

Crime is going down – officially. The trouble is that most people don’t believe it: they feel that society is becoming more crime-ridden. So what could explain the discrepancy between the claims made by politicians and the everyday experience of citizens? In this hard-hitting exposé, Rodger Patrick, former Chief Inspector of West Midlands Police, shows how this has come about. He unpacks the… [Full Details]

Since 2002, more than 40 million criminal records checks have been carried out at a cost of nearly two billion pounds, yet there has never been any significant research showing the effectiveness of mass vetting in child protection terms. In June 2010, the Coalition government promised to 'scale back' criminal records checks to 'common-sense proportions', predicting that its reforms would lead to a halving… [Full Details]

Institutional racism is an unfair allegation to level at British police forces and its universal acceptance by public officials has led to harmful policymaking, according to a new Civitas report. In Mind Forg'd Manacles, Jon Gower Davies outlines the history and influence of 'institutional racism' since the Macpherson inquiry, following the murder of Stephen Lawrence. He finds the evidence for institutional racism within British… [Full Details]

As the criminal justice system faces unprecedented cuts in the wake of the financial crisis, many members of the public fear for their safety. Criminals will face fewer police on the streets and a prison system that will struggle to contain convicts. But is an increase in crime inevitable? In this report, world-renowned criminologist Lawrence W. Sherman and former Chief Constable Peter W. Neyroud… [Full Details]

Open societies in which we try to settle our differences without violence have been a great human achievement. However, because freedom of speech is the prevailing view in Britain, we are not as alert to the risk of its overthrow as we should be. In A New Inquisition, Jon Gower Davies, former Head of the Religious Studies Department at the University of Newcastle, examines the… [Full Details]

Sharia law is a distillation of rulings that purport to represent the divine diktat in all worldly affairs. It provides injunctions for the conduct of criminal, public and even international law. Marriage and divorce, the custody of children, alimony, sexual impropriety and much else come within its remit. Sharia courts are operating in Britain, handing down rulings that may be inappropriate to this country, being… [Full Details]

Expenditure on the police force is at record levels but there is widespread public dissatisfaction, while the police complain of being short of resources. They are not intended to be servants of the state, but of the communities they serve. Their powers are personal and derived from the crown, but this essential feature of British policing - policing by consent - is now in jeopardy… [Full Details]

For over half a century violent crime has been rising in this country while the penalties for it have been falling. These two trends throw current sentencing practices into the spotlight of public policy concern. Charles Murray argues that criminal offenders deserve penalties of which the degree of severity matches the seriousness of their crimes… [Full Details]

An 18-month study of the British Government's policies for crime reduction found that it has failed to learn even the simplest lessons from overseas experience. Crime and Civil Society found that the most basic measures necessary to encourage a law-abiding life on release are not being taken: particularly getting prisoners off drugs and providing basic and vocational skills… [Full Details]

There are few issues which raise more concern than the increase in crime and anti-social behaviour. In spite of attempts by criminologists to dismiss these concerns as "moral panic", and in spite of attempts by the government to massage the statistics, citizens feel increasingly threatened. Cultures and Crimes argues that this increase in crime is the result of profound cultural changes which occurred in… [Full Details]

In January 2003 the Home Office claimed that the chance of being a victim of crime "remains historically low". However, the staggering rise in the volume of crime, within living memory, has been so great that it is difficult to convey the enormous shift in the law-abidingness and "policeability" of the English… [Full Details]

For hundreds of years civil society was "the arena of freedom", that network of free institutions made possible by the framework of law and order. As government grew, politicians took over many of the functions of those institutions. The state became the source of benefits, redistributing wealth and "crowding out" the institutions of civil society… [Full Details]

The Macpherson Report (1999) produced no evidence at all of racist policies in the Metropolitan Police. The report did not even produce evidence of any racist "bad apples" among the officers who were involved in the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. See also the accompanying Institutional Racism and the Police… [Full Details]

The Macpherson Report (1999) was a watershed in British race relations and led to the adoption of policies by the Metropolitan Police and Home Office. Macpherson's claim that the Metropolitan Police were guilty of "institutional racism" provoked considerable controversy at the time of publication and continues to be strongly disputed… [Full Details]

This book brings together police officers from both sides of the Atlantic to describe their efforts to deal effectively with rising crime. New York achieved a significant reduction in its crime rate following the introduction of "zero-tolerance" policing under the leadership of William Bratton, while at about the same time, a similar experiment was being conducted in Hartlepool under the leadership of Ray Mallon… [Full Details]